


Last Son Of

by emilyenrose



Category: DCU, Smallville
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-05
Updated: 2007-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyenrose/pseuds/emilyenrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. <em>Planet Earth sees the meteor coming just in time to be unable to do anything about it. </em>Lex Luthor is the last son of Earth, Kal-El is a poor little rich boy and his cousin Kara is <em>not </em>going to marry him, and the Green Lantern Corps are a little bit concerned about Kryptonian politics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Son Of

**Author's Note:**

> I have played fast and loose with so many different bits of different canons it isn't funny. Clark - sorry, Kal - and Lex are (more or less) from Smallville. Kyle Rainer and the rest of the Green Lantern Corps are from the DCU. Kara is also from the DCU, and while I am not going to touch the many, many, many permutations of the Supergirl story with a ten-foot bargepole, in _some _versions she is Clark's irritating Kryptonian cousin who becomes Supergirl.

Planet Earth sees the meteor coming just in time to be unable to do anything about it.

In the subsequent apocalyptic running-around-like-headless-chickens portion of events, Lionel Luthor puts every last LuthorCorp scientist, and every other scientist he can hire, onto the design of an escape capsule equipped for interstellar survival. They load the ungainly machine's extraordinary data banks with most of Earth's science and history, and the final trajectory of the last two survivors of what will eventually come to be called the Terran Disaster is plotted for a planet which astronomers believe will be capable of supporting human life.

The scientists do not tell Lionel that they do not think the life support system is capable of maintaining an adult. There is really no point. But, since they have been working for him for years, it is without much regret that they program the capsule's computers to reroute all support to the other occupant as soon as they leave Earth's atmosphere. In spite of their best efforts, the radiation shielding is not _quite _strong enough, and when the Terran machine crash-lands on Krypton, the child inside has lost all his hair. He appears to be otherwise unharmed, though.

By pure good fortune, the landing was in one of the few places on-planet not covered by one of Krypton's legendary megacities.

To be precise, in the gardens of the House of El.

The nurse-bodyguard who was supposed to be defending the young heir to the house was killed instantaneously by the shockwave the impact created - the only person, in fact, to be harmed. The survival of two-year-old Kal-El remains a mystery. When Jor-El and Lara rushed to the scene, they were greeted with the peculiar sight of their son clinging happily to the knees of a naked alien child who watched them warily and stated incomprehensible demands in its own language.

(By the time Lex has learned Kryptonian, he will know better than to speak at all before the head of the House of El. By the time the rest of the galaxy has learned the language known as Terran, everyone will have long forgotten that the first thing he said when he woke on a strange new world was a tearful demand for his father.)  
_

After Lara talks Jor-El down from his fit of rage, he admits that killing the alien will serve no purpose - in fact, that this is the first time an creature unprotected by the Green Lantern Accords regarding experimentation on sentients has come into the hands of Kryptonian scientists in several hundred years. (The Green Lanterns, interfering busybodies, are not welcome on Krypton; but their arm is long, and their allies are many.) He reluctantly hands over the child to his younger brother Zor, who for some years now has been working on some interesting theories regarding the chemistry of the conscious mind. The Terran machine he places in his private storage, to be studied later, and he forgets all about the incident when a breakthrough a few weeks later proves that he was right about yellow sunlight, _right_, and damn you all.  
_

'Lex', in Kryptonian, is a syllable only found in compound verbs, meaning 'hand' with an implication of movement (such as _iyllex_, 'door-hand' or 'slam'; _ktelex_, 'up-hand' or 'attack'; and _ktelex-dal_, 'to assault by air'). In the early days, Zor-El - always more soft-hearted than his brother - tried to give the child a true Kryptonian name, which however he refused to acknowledge, snapping finally in his broken Kryptonian that his name was Lex-Zandar-Lutor

Zor laughed, of course. Triple-barelled names are only granted on Krypton to great heroes and leaders.

(I mention this only because various historians will later try to make it significant. It wasn't.)  
_

Kara is twelve, and she doesn't know a whole lot about her father's best lab assistant except that he's an alien who's never been to school and he hasn't got any hair and she's not allowed to mention him in front of her uncle. Which is strange, because sometimes he eats with the family, and that makes him _anak-sal_, a slave who is also a friend and may not be sold. But she loves her father and does not like Uncle Jor much, so she does as she is told.

When Uncle Jor comes to take the morning meal with them, he slaps both his brother's upper arms and asks him how his study of the mind is going - even though Kara knows that's not what he's studying at all. For years she thinks Uncle Jor is very stupid, and then later she realises that her father is lying to him on purpose and she thinks instead that her father is very brave. She shows her solidarity by never telling her cousin Kal anything either. Of course, Kal _is _very stupid, so it's not difficult. Even though he's older than she is, all she has to do is order him to sit over there and leave her alone and he does it, and then she can get on with what she's doing and ignore the way he watches her with a stupid hoping expression.

She also shows her solidarity by truly treating Lex as _anak-sal_, which is hard to do because he doesn't seem to realise that he's being honoured when she talks to him and hardly ever says anything back. She tells her father that Lex must be even stupider than Kal, which makes him roar with laughter. "Kara, little love," he says, kneeling down so they're face to face, "Lex is rather cleverer than Kal."

Kara looks at him sceptically. His mouth twitches. "In fact," he whispers, "don't tell anyone, daughter, but Lex is rather cleverer than me, too."

"Oh, Fa_ther_," she says, with all the scorn she can muster. "Lex didn't write the paper on Idalius theory, or the one about interstellar phase travel" - naming the publications which have won her father accolades lately - "_or_..."

She trails off. Zor-El is shaking his head. "He did, though, Kara," he says. "He did."

"But - but - but you're a genius -" she says. "Uncle Jor says they were genius -"

"I'm not. They were."

Kara stares at him. "An alien can't be a genius!"

"That's where my brother is wrong." Zor sighs, and climbs to his feet, all traces of the playful mood gone. "Kara, what I will tell you now is _not... _politically appropriate, but it is important and you must remember it. We Kryptonians are not as... unique, not as special, as we want to believe we are. The galaxy - the universe - is much larger than this one small planet - and we were not born to rule it. It is the Senate's ambition to rule it and so they talk of racial superiority - maybe they even believe it. I know Jor believes it. I once believed it. But Lex is living proof that the world is not as simple as my brother wishes it to be." He pauses. "He is twenty, you know. He has been in service for twelve years."

The minimum service time before a legal manumission is possible is fourteen. "You're going to free him?" Kara asks. "But - but he is _anak-sal, _you can't free _anak-sal_ -"

"You can indeed," contradicts her father. "The reason so few people do is because you are obliged by law to adopt them into your family when you are done."

"What? You can't make _him _my _brother_!"

"Do you know why you don't have a brother, Kara?" She shakes her head. "Because Jor already has a son, and the existence of more than one possible heir for the House of El would infuriate him. Our father nearly had me killed - only your grandmother's begging stayed his hand. And your existence was only permitted because your uncle fully expects you to marry Kal."

This gets worse and worse. "I _won't _marry Kal."

"You won't," agrees Zor grimly. "Lex has convinced me as nothing else could that the world needs to change. And adopting an alien into the House of El - is the first step." He grins. "Only imagine Uncle Jor's face, hmm? The embarrassment will damage his position in the Senate. By tradition, he will remain at home for some time to show his shame. But I, for my part, will feel nothing of the sort."

Kara stares at him, awed. The law only says that each House may send one son to occupy its place in the Senate. If the head of the House of El is absent - "Father, you're going to_ take his seat_?"

He puts his finger over her lips. "Quietly, now. Not a word to anyone, my strong girl - do you understand? And maybe one day when you are grown you shall visit foreign worlds, and see the gardens of Yltac, and the seven moons of Hammadir."

Kara knows what that means. Thanks to the Green Lantern sanctions regarding slavery, no Kryptonian has been permitted entrance to another civilised world in almost a hundred years. She is twelve years old, and it is there and then that her imagination catches fire.

(Most Kryptonian historians underestimate the role that Kara of the House of El - later simply Karae'l of Kandor - played in the revolution. Other races contend that this is because of lingering Kryptonian traditions regarding the subservience of females.)  
_

Lex considers Zor-El his uncle.

He couldn't consider him his father, obviously, because he remembers his real father and Zor-El pales by comparison – but the man is nonetheless family to him, teacher and protector and role-model. Lex once slipped up and actually called him 'uncle' when he was about ten, but since Zor-El doesn't understand English Lex was able to tell him only that it was a mark of respect for an admired male senior, which pleased him.

By this token, Kara Zor-El is his cousin. Lex is all right with that.

(When Zor-El's servants came to tell him his wife was dying, and please - please come quickly - he'd paled and rushed off straight away, leaving Lex just sitting there in the empty lab, eight years old and two months into his life as Subject #1. The alien scientist hadn't even bothered to restrain him. He considered smashing the room, taking one of the burners and using it to set fire to Zor-El's heap of papers, but decided it was safer and more sensible simply to run.

He never managed to get out – the gates were high and locked all the time – but in the empty sprawling mansion that was the secondary residence of the House of El, where only a too-small family and a too-careless staff lived, he stayed out of sight for the best part of a month, stealing food from the storerooms at night. The grief-stricken master of the house never even noticed his absence, because he never returned to the lab. By the second week, the constant wailing from the nursery annoyed Lex so much that he crept inside one night to tell the baby to shut up. She looked up at him with a hopeful hiccup and big eyes and suddenly he felt like eight years old was the oldest thing there'd ever been.

He stayed in there with her every night, wide awake, and slept in undusted corners during the day. She seemed happier for it. Lex felt important, like he had a mission – like he was protecting someone.

On the twenty-third day Zor-El stumbled into his daughter's room early, early one morning, and Lex leapt to his feet but stood aside while the scientist stared at him with a dazed expression. "What are you doing?" he asked. It was the first time he'd ever spoken directly to Lex.

"You should stay with her," Lex told him, stumbling over the consonant clusters. "Fathers are important."

"You speak our language?" said Zor-El. He looked a little dizzy.

Lex shrugged. "You talk all the time. It wasn't hard.")

Kara has become increasingly baffling as she and Lex both got older, and of course for several years – until the first time Zor-El invited him to eat with them, in fact – he had no right to speak to her at all. But she is a golden candleflame of a twelve-year-old, and no, he really doesn't mind her for a cousin.

Until she starts talking to him.

She had of course talked to him before, with the condescension of nobleman's daughter to _anak-sal_. Now she talks to him as if he's an equal – she follows him in the hallways – turns up in his bedroom to bounce on the bed and chat with him – tries to tease him, and someone up there is clearly laughing at him, almost as much as Zor-El does when he broaches the subject. "Be nice to her, Lex," he says, with a little hint of steel in his voice, "she's never had a brother before."

"You told her the plan?" asks Lex, incredulously. Zor-El doesn't bother to answer him, and really, there's no need. He gives up and starts being nice to Kara.

"Do you remember your world?" she says to him one day (when he is trying to finish a complex set of equations, but never mind). "Why did they send you away? Were you a criminal?"

"My world was destroyed by a meteor," says Lex – even at eight, some things sink in pretty damn deeply. "My father was a very great man – sort of like Jor-El, really – and he had his scientists build the capsule so I would survive."

She looks awed. "So you were like Kal?"

He grins. "I was a lot smarter than Kal."

She shrieks with laughter. Insulting Kara's cousin is by far the quickest way to her heart. Lex goes back to the equations.

"Where is it?" asks Kara later. "The capsule, I mean."

Lex's heart twists. He still remembers what he never told any of the Kryptonians, that his father was supposed to be with him, that he promised all Earth's greatness would be preserved with them. "I suppose Jor-El still has it," he says.

She frowns. "That's not right. It's yours. I'll get it back for you."

"How are you going to do that?"

She tosses her head, thick yellow hair going every which way. "I'll make friends with Kal. Then he'll have to help."

Sometimes Lex almost feels sorry for this boy Kal, this moron he's never seen.  
_

(Two years later, Lex is twenty-two, Kal is sixteen, and Kara is nearly fifteen. There are two weeks to go before the manumission-and-adoption plan goes into action. These are details that are agreed on in all the histories. Most of them leave out the intervening months, which is a shame, because at least two important things happened then –

this:

_"What do you want to know?" asked Kara silkily._

"What are you doing," said Kal, not bothering to make it a question, the words tumbling out like vomit. "Why are you here, why won't you tell me, why do you hate me, who is that -"

"I'm Lex," said Lex, "and Kara, let me handle this. Kal, isn't it?"

and this:

_"We are like-minded men – "_

" – and women!"

"And women, thank you, Lady Maza," Zor-El nodded to her. "We are meeting here in secret because we believe that Krypton has suffered long enough from this ill-judged policy of isolationism, and it is time to take up our rightful place – peacefully – among the greatest civilizations of the galaxy. So here and now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to vow with me that we will not cease in our striving until our goals have been achieved – "

though the histories always pick up the story again with what happened on Kara's fifteenth birthday.)  
_

Kara wakes up with a start in the middle of the night, and there is a masked man in her room.

"Who are you?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question under the circumstances, but she thinks she should be the one asking it.

"I am Kara Zor-El," she informs the intruder icily. "I don't know who you are, but you had better get out of my bedroom fast because my father is Zor-El of the House of El -"

"The House of El? Really?" He sounds surprised, and like a man who is not used to being surprised. He peels off his mask and lets it drop on the floor, where it glows bright green for a moment against the smooth stone, and then vanishes. Kara stares. "My name is Kyle Rainer. I was sent to find you by the Green Lantern Corps – well, I assume to find you, these were the coordinates we were given by – never mind."

The words he mutters sound a little like the few syllables of Terran Lex still uses sometimes – more often since they rescued the capsule from the depths of her uncle's storage room. The man looks like a Terran, too – well, he looks Kryptonian, but so does Lex. Kara makes a note to ask him what a 'fucking fortune-teller' is, sometime when she's less stunned and there is no alien representative of an intergalactic peacekeeping force in her bedroom.

"What do the Green Lanterns want with me?" she demands, trying to sound imperious and not nervous. She's heard many things about the Corps, most of them bad. Her father, she thinks, approves of them, and that is the only reason she hasn't screamed yet.

"Well, to get straight to the point -"  
_

Kara never knows why it was she went to Lex first, unless it was that she's always been afraid to wake her father in the mornings.

Lex is grouchy too, of course, but there's no comparison. "_You?_" he says, with rather insulting astonishment. "They want _you_ to be a -?"

"I think I _am_. He gave me the ring, made me swear an oath – Lex, I don't know how to be a superhero!"

"The Green Lantern Corps on our side," mutters Lex, not listening, "an open declaration of alliance – they'll have to – and your powers to back us up. Kara, I could kiss you." He catches sight of her expression. "Don't look at me like that, if you want sympathy, go to Kal. He worships the ground you walk on – but then, we always knew he was an idiot."  
_

(This is what is happening to Kal-El at about the same time: his father is, for the first time in years, meeting his eyes, smiling at him. His father has not once yet during the interminable morning meal called him weak. Kal is nervous and elated and wishes he could do something extraordinary to be worthy of his family. In about half an hour, Jor-El will invite him down to the laboratory – for the first time ever. In forty-five minutes, he will be lying trustingly beneath the golden lamp that has taken Jor-El nearly fourteen years to build.

In two hours' time, he – or something that looks like him – will be present at the meeting of the Senate where Zor-El will come forward with the announcement of his intention to manumit an _anak-sal_. It will also be the meeting where Jor-El is declared, by unanimous vote of the survivors, Overlord of Krypton.)  
_

Kara knows that Kal had no more control over the strength of his arms and the fire of his eyes at that meeting than a puppet – Jor-El's puppet.

Nevertheless, she will never really forgive him for the death of her father.

Lex will. In fact, Lex will hold himself personally responsible instead.

This is the difference between Lex and Kara.  
_

Kal tells them what happened himself. He does it crouched in a corner of Lex's small bedroom, his hands knotted around his knees as if he fears they might fly off without him otherwise, his eyes screwed shut. Kara wants to scream and wail when he is done, but Lex stops her with a touch of his hand on her shoulder. "Yellow sunlight, of course," he murmurs. "I should have guessed what Jor-El was up to." He stands and crosses the room to where Kal is curled miserably in on himself (and hovering, apparently unconsciously, a finger's width off the ground).

"Kal," he says softly.

"Don't," says Kal, "don't, don't, I'm dangerous -"

"Kal," says Lex, "open your eyes."

Kal does. Kara gasps. But Lex doesn't die.

"I thought so," he says. "It would be useless if it couldn't be controlled."

"But it is controlled," says Kal. He closes his eyes again. "I hate my father," he whispers. "I hate him. I _hate_ him."

"Fathers are important," says Lex. He could be agreeing or disagreeing, it's hard to tell. "Do you know how long the effects will last?"

"No," says Kal.

"Better go with the assumption that it's permanent, then – there's no reason for it not to be. _Ubermensch_," he adds. Kara can tell it's a Terran word from the softness of the sound, the way it can be hissed.

"What – what is that?" asks Kal.

"Something I found in the capsule. It was marked – I think my father was trying to tell me something." Lex pauses. "A philosopher from my homeworld once said that strength was the ultimate good. He imagined a world where the strong struggled against each other until only the greatest was left to rule over all – and he called that man _Ubermensch_." He lingers over the strange sounds of the word. "In Kryptonian… Superman." A smile. "Well. This _will_ make for some interesting history books."

"What will?" Kara demands, knowing she's interrupting something and not caring. Lex turns to her and grins like something that scents blood in the water.

"The story of the time two super-powered teenagers and an alien genius saved Krypton from the tyrant and dragged her kicking and screaming into modernity," he says.

"What?" says Kara.

"_Two?_" says Kal.  
_

And the rest, of course, is history.

They say Jor-El begged when he died, proud façade cracking to show the coward lurking beneath, and Lex shot him through the head with a Kryptonite bullet while Kal was on the far side of the world rescuing the victims of his father's war-machines.

They say that the Senate tried to make first Kal and then Lex the new Overlord, and then Lex politely suggested that Lady Maza was perhaps more qualified than either of them for the job of dismantling the totalitarian state.

They say that even after the war was over, Kandor refused to answer to the Kryptonian central government again, and Maza after weeks of stalled negotiations called in Lex, who threw up his hands with a sigh and granted them independence.

They say – and this is perfectly true – that the billowy Greek-inspired folds of Kara's version of the Green Lantern uniform set a planetwide trend for clothes that weren't skintight and made of plastic.  
_

The rest of Kara's career is a matter of public record. What became of Lex Luthor and Kal-El after they left Krypton together is a matter which is often debated. She only ever smiled when she was asked.

Meanwhile, back on the world known sometimes as Terra and sometimes as Earth, the aftermath of the meteor strike has been less dramatic than was supposed in the original panic. As a matter of fact, it is generally agreed that – while the loss of life involved was regrettable – the contribution that the sudden threat made to human development of interstellar travel cannot be overstated.

And – because these details should be recorded – I will mention that one of the LuthorCorp scientists won a Nobel Prize.


End file.
